America's Frontier Culture: Three Essays (Volume 3)

Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest

by Ray Allen Billington

In this little classic, first published in 1977, Ray A. Billington outlines the threecenturylong process of westering that forged the American characteristics of resourcefulness, individualism and democracy, and upward social mobility.

“The American Frontiersman” looks at the mountain men of the fur trade who succumbed to the wilderness world in which they found themselves and in which they were forced to begin the climb upward to civilization once more. In “The Frontier and American Culture” the author suggests that although many backwoodsmen seceded from civilization, others made a heroic effort to perpetuate their culture. And in “Cowboys, Indians, and the Land of Promise” Billington reviews the worldwide myths of the American West—its violence and lawlessness on the one hand and its ripe abundance on the other.

108 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1977

About the author

Ray Allen Billington was an American historian focusing his work on the history of the American frontier and the American West, becoming one of the leading defenders of Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" from the 1950s to the 1970s, expanding the field of the history of the American West. He was a co-founder of the Western History Association in 1961.